Source Description

On June 22, 1862, Wilhelm Marr published the
first edition of his work, “Der Judenspiegel” [“A Mirror
to the Jews”](editions 1-4, 56 pp), with the second through fourth editions
appearing within a few weeks. The fifth edition, which will be quoted from here
unless otherwise noted, was published in the same year, however with a
“different Foreword” and now comprising 58 pages. In this version the two-page
Afterword of the earlier editions, as well as the two-page “Addendum,” were
dropped. In them Marr
explains why he at first hesitated to publish the work and what then prompted
him to do so. The book was self-published (printed by Pontt
und Döhren). Marr identified his motive for altering the Introduction to the
fifth edition as his response to “the guttersnipe ways in which the majority of
Hamburg’s
leading Jews reacted against my person rather than my writing,”Wilhelm Marr, Der
Judenspiegel, Hamburg, 51862, p.
3. thus compelling him to remove the earlier introduction’s
“conciliatory conclusion”Wilhelm Marr, Der Judenspiegel, Hamburg, 51862; self-published, Printer: Pontt und
Döhr, p. 3. and, instead, mounting a counter-critique
against the false judgments of his work.

In 1862
Marr had, at first
intended to support Reform Judaism in its controversy with Jewish Orthodoxy with
a pro-emancipation piece.
The harsh criticism of his June 13, 1862 letter
to the “Courier on the Weser” prompted him to hastily rework a manuscript that
had been put aside, resulting in the many inconsistencies that Marr himself later described
as “immature.” Now he attacked not only the Orthodox but also the Reform Jews as
reactionary. The title page carried an epigraph from Heinrich Heine’s topical
poem of 1843, “Das neue Israelitische Hospital in
Hamburg”
(The new Jewish hospital in Hamburg) in which the talk is of Judaism as “a thousand
year-old malady” but which also gives expression, in the form of a question, to
the hope that “perhaps one day the grandchild [will] recover and be reasonable
and happy,”Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke (Düsseldorfer Ausgabe) Bd. 2 Neue
Gedichte, bearb. von Elisabeth Genton, Hamburg 1983, pp.
171f.—striking the theme of [Marr’s] book.